Like this:

Saturday, July 9, 2016 3:40 pm

For months I’ve been dealing with a Google Chrome problem that has refused to stay fixed. Googling the issue has only gotten me approximately helpful answers, so I’m turning to the hive mind.

When I download something in Chrome, regardless of what it is and regardless of whether it’s an email attachment or something on a web page, Chrome begins misbehaving. Any open web pages I have will begin to freeze up. If I try to open a new page, I can’t, and I get an error message telling me the page is hung up and asking whether I want to wait, or to kill the page.

When I attempt to close/reboot Chrome, I’ll get this message, no matter how long ago the download happened:

I have to cancel the download (which in every instance really is already complete) before I can close completely out of Chrome.

Moreover, before I can reopen Chrome, I find that I must go into Task Manager, where there will always be a single Chrome process still running, often at high levels of memory — more than 100 megs — relative to the 20 to 60 megs most Chrome processes seem to use on my machine). And I have to kill that process before I can proceed to reopen Chrome.

I’ve Googled this, I’ve looked on Google’s forums, and the closest I have gotten to a solution is a suggestion that a Chrome plug-in or extension can be causing this problem. I run few of either, so the process of elimination didn’t take long: When I disabled the Flash plugin, Chrome started working normally.

But not for long.

Now, I’m experiencing the same problem even with Flash disabled (hell, even with it uninstalled). And I can’t figure out why.

I’ve rebooted the machine (many times over). I’ve rebooted Chrome multiple times. I’ve uninstalled Chrome and done a clean install. And still I have this problem. Has anyone ever experienced this, and if so, how were you able to resolve it? Thanks in advance for your help.

Yesterday I posted a graphic on Facebook with a message to the effect that if it had been 11 members of Congress who had been shot down with an AR-15, we’d have an assault-rifle ban tout de suite.

Leaving aside the question of whether that’s actually true (I doubt it — the malevolent influence of the National Rifle Association on our politics remains too strong), one of my friends posted this comment, which I think bears further examination and discussion:

“What happened in Dallas is the revolt against government that the anti-government crowd has been telling us is the reason our 2nd amendment rights are so important.”

I infer that she means something like this: Our police departments, which are part of the government, have been committing so many unjustified offenses against so many of our citizens — primarily African American — that the attack on Dallas police might well be looked at as justified revolution against a corrupt, tyrannical and unjust government, the kind that people who oppose limits on gun rights say we all should be prepared to undertake if necessary.

To be clear, I don’t think that way: The killings of those officers in Dallas were, to me, nothing but assassination and should be prosecuted and punished accordingly. I believe — and perhaps this is nothing but an artifact of my white, male, until-recently-Republican privilege — that this problem, this crisis, still can be addressed via nonviolent political means (and I pray daily that it will be). Just one example, and one which to me made those killings all the more tragic, is the fact that, as Chris Lowrance and others have observed, the Dallas PD and Black Lives Matter have been working together to improve both police training and police-community relations, with both sides reporting progress.

Too, we have seen fake and unjustified “revolutions” at the hands of such criminals as the Bundys. And as I have said before, I am beyond tired of watching my government kiss seditious white ass rather than locking these fools up (which finally began happening after the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon earlier this year).

What about torture? What about warrantless domestic wiretapping? What about kowtowing to banks and other for-profit corporations at the expense of the public good? I’m not arguing that these are good examples, just trying to get you to think about what a truly objectionable act of government, an act or pattern of behavior that might morally, if not legally, justify a revolution in the way that the American revolution was justified in the Declaration of Independence, might look like.

Saturday, July 2, 2016 12:15 pm

Not for the first or last time, Bill Clinton has committed, at the least, an enormous unforced error, to the significant detriment of his wife’s presidential campaign.

Clinton met at an Arizona airport with Attorney General Loretta Lynch. This would be the same attorney general whose Department of Justice is investigating possible crimes with respect to Hillary Clinton’s having used a private email server and who ultimately must sign off on any decision about prosecutions.

Clinton and Lynch have said they did not discuss the case. I’m skeptical, and we’ll probably never know. But let’s assume for the sake of discussion that they didn’t: It was still an enormously stupid thing for Bill to have done.

This meeting happened just after the release of a report by the congressional committee that is investigating the deaths of four Americans in an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi. (Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server was part and parcel of that investigation.) That report, two years and $7 million in the making, found no wrongdoing on the part of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Given that the whole investigation — indeed, the whole committee — was nothing but a partisan witch hunt, this should have been an opportunity for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign to take a big ol’ victory lap and rub the GOP’s face in its own failure. Instead, the story of Bill Clinton’s meeting with Lynch popped up almost immediately, and the media hubbub over that meeting pretty much drowned out the good news for the Clinton campaign.

Now, a lot of people I’ve interacted with on social media claim that this is a bullshit nonstory blown up by a GOP-compliant media. To which I respond: So what? We already know that our news media tend to make nothingburgers about Democrats into Big Hairy Deals while ignoring or downplaying the much worse excesses of Republicans. (Here’s just one particularly relevant example: The GOP established a special congressional committee to look into the deaths of four Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi — but did nothing about the deaths of 60 Americans in dozens of attacks on U.S. embassies that took place during the George W. Bush administration.)

As someone in the PR business, I would tell any client that you need to deal with the news media as they are, not as you wish they were. To do otherwise is to violate a basic rule of PR: If you do something that looks bad, a nontrivial number of people in the media are likely to claim that it is bad even if it really isn’t.

Critics of this position tend to argue that the news media need to be better at their jobs (which they do) and that because there’s no actual, substantive wrongdoing here (so far as we know), it doesn’t matter. But it does. One reason the Clintons score so low on the trustworthiness scale is that they have a long history of doing things that look wrong even if they actually aren’t wrong. That history includes, among many greatest hits, Bill’s claim to have smoked pot without inhaling, Hillary’s unlikely but apparently legitimate profit at cattle-futures trading, and Hillary’s latter-day flip-flops on issues ranging from same-sex marriage to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Each of these things, in isolation, means little or nothing. But put them all together, combine with the aforementioned media flaws and Republican pile-ons, and shake well, and you get a pretty poisonous PR cocktail.

The Clintons’ defenders in this instance argue that this somehow doesn’t matter, but unforced errors this big always matter. And the vehemence with which these defenders argue their position, even though it makes no sense to anyone with a lick of common sense, let alone PR training, suggests that on some level, they know Bill Clinton screwed up and they’re angry about it but just don’t want to admit it.

I have said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m voting for Hillary in November because I am a single-issue voter and my single issue is not opening the seventh seal and ushering in the Apocalypse. But given the ability and willingness of Republicans and their media allies (unwitting or otherwise) to turn nothingburgers into “scandals,” the Clintons desperately need PR counsel with absolute veto power over their worst instincts. And history suggests that they either don’t know this or don’t care.